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'Solaris' Screen Adaptation Forthcoming
Jooly Rodney writes "No, not the operating system, the sci-fi novel by Stanislaw Lem, long considered to be a classic of the genre. Apple's movie trailer site features a teaser trailer, and IMDb has George Clooney and Natascha McElhone as the leads Kelvin and Rheya."
They're running the trailer before showings of Minority Report (at least, they were yesterday at the matinee I went to). Only names mentioned in the trailer were James Cameron, Steven Soderbergh, and George Clooney.
Needless to say, those three names along with some beautiful deep-space type footage definitely piqued my interest.
I saw the trailer last night waiting for "Minority Report" to start. To call this a trailer is a bit of an overstatement, it's just a slow pull-out shot starting from some oddly mixing waves(?) on the surface of a star/planet going all the way out until a rotating spacecraft (reminiscent of the space station in 2001) comes into frame. Then it informs you that George Clooney stars. That's it. Not very informative at all.
This may seem like a dumb question in retrospect, but the CGI was not the best I had ever seen, which leads me to this query: is this an animated film of some sort? I haven't seen any information on any of the usual sites I read about this movie.
There's a fan site re both "Solaris" movies:
http://www.k26.com/solaris/
In light of Soderburgh's career, Solaris, with its anxious, looming regret for the failures of relationships past and poignant sense of human limitation, is an ideal film for him.
It's not just driving, it's driving through endless maze of gray concrete multilevel freeway interchanges and ramps filmed in Germany. This kind of stuff was seen by his audience of 1972's USSR as something alien. It expresses an anti-utopian view of future technology.
Classic you say? Do you know that Stanislav Lem himself was sick from that movie? Basically he wrote a book about incredible wonders that can be found in the universe and how interesting it must be to go and search for such things. In the Russian movie (I saw it a few times back in USSR) the director is trying to display how horrible and scary it is to go to space. Basically that was the main problem with the movie, except, of-course for the very slow style and very basic setup.
You can't handle the truth.
I'm in the minority that I liked Event Horizon. Still with Hollywood now making an adaptation of Red Dragon when Manhunter was a perfectly good film, you have to wonder what the memory span of film producers are.
"And to answer the poster below, maybe Lem didn't like the film, but I bet he wouldn't like some brash American remake either. I'm sorry, but at least Tarkovsky turned the novel (or ideas contained therein) into something worth watching and learning from, rather than a sloppy piece of entertainment-action."
Well, he actually ignores it. As it is written here:
Interviewer: This (new "Solaris") movie is going to be produced by James Cameron, the director of "Titanic".
Lem: I don't know, although it's quite possible that Cameron will make it. You know, I don't care about it a lot. The more the Americans are engaged in any project, the less the author has to say. Still, the idea that now some forty scriptwriters work over my novel doesn't bring me a lot of satisfaction. For the time being I am not even allowed to look into the scenario. But I wouldn't like to do it, as I am afraid that after reading it I'd be really angry. Also, what can you find interesting:
I: Solaris by Tarkowski is the most famous adaptation of any of your novels, although it's quite far from the original novel. Philosophical debates became more stressed than the dialogue between astronauts and the ocean.
Lem: Situation is very delicate. Although I have a lot of respect for Tarkowski's movies I hate this one. I tried to presuade Tarkowski from his odd ideas for exactly six weeks. The scenario missed the novel too much. Tarkowski created Kelvin's family, he added some terrible aunts and uncles, which were removed after my rant.
Hope it helps. And feel free to correct my English. ;)
Region 2 is still in print
Region 1 is harder to find
Region 0 is out there
Most likely, you saw one of the painfully edited versions that made its way west during the Cold War. There is a restored version available. I have seen two different edits, and own the restored version on DVD. If you've seen one of the edits, you have missed a lot.
One thing that must be taken into consideration concerning Tarkovsky's version that I hadn't seen in the commentaries here is that his film is a Soviet response to Stanley' Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. One commentary that sticks in my mind is that Tarkovsky is said to have complained of 2001 that the "Thus Spake Zarathustra" music at the end might as well have been "Stars and Stripes Forever." One of the above posters spoke of some of the details and stylistic elements of Tarkovsky's version. There is, as with Tarkovsky's other films and like Eisenstein before him, a special 'Soviet' message/argument in the 1972 Solaris. There is a significant danger that making a new Solaris in the post-9/11 world will be equally message-laden and presented to an audience less conscious of the message content of films than was the Soviet film-going public of the mid-Brezhnev 1970s.